The past generation has been marked by a technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. The effect has, in turn, driven technologies that have been known and available but relatively quiescent over the years. A major one of these technologies is the Internet related distribution of documents, media and programs. The convergence of the electronic entertainment and consumer industries with data processing exponentially accelerated the demand for wide ranging communications distribution channels and the Web or Internet, which had quietly existed for over a generation as a loose academic and government data distribution facility, reached “critical mass” and commenced a period of phenomenal expansion. With this expansion, businesses and consumers have direct access to all matter of documents, media and computer programs.
In addition, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which had been the documentation language of the Internet or Web for years, offered direct links between pages and other documentation on the Web and a variety of related data sources that were, at first, text and then evolved into media, i.e. “hypermedia”. This even further exploded the use of the Internet or Web. It was now possible for the Web browser or wanderer to spend literally hours going through document after document and accompanying media events in often less than productive excursions through the Web. These excursions strained the user's time and resources. A significant source of this drain is in the Web page, the basic document page of the Web. Although many Web pages are professionally designed and, thus, relatively efficient to use, there are still a great many Web pages that are very cumbersome to access and to use.
Among the attempts by Internet or Web (used interchangeably) industries to solve these problems have been the development of Web portals. These are Web sites that provide specialized capabilities to their users. During the recent era when Netscape Web browsers were prominent on the Web, the Web portals were often starting or launching points for the browser onto the Web. Also, Yahoo! provided some of the early Web portals. Governments and governmental agencies used Web portals. Web portals for industries and marketplaces have become very widely used. A generalized description of Web portals may be found in the text, Internet: The Complete Reference, Millennium Edition, Young et al. published 1999, Osbourne/McGraw-Hill, Berkeley, Calif., at pp. 394-395. It is not uncommon for Internet Service Providers to provide the user with their entry page as a Web Portal page. By their nature, Portal Web pages are likely to give the interactive user a cluttered or chaotic effect, particularly since they often rely on advertising for a portion of their revenue. Thus, it has been a Web industry goal to preserve the wide variety of links to other Web pages provided by Web Portal pages while making the portlets on such pages easier to access and more user friendly. The present invention offers an implementation toward this end.